There is an increasing demand for advanced optical imaging techniques that can detect and resolve nanosize objects at a spatial resolution below the optical diffraction limit, especially in three-dimensional （3D） ce...There is an increasing demand for advanced optical imaging techniques that can detect and resolve nanosize objects at a spatial resolution below the optical diffraction limit, especially in three-dimensional （3D） cellular environments. In this study, using a polarization-activated localization scheme based on the orientation-dependent properties of anisotropic plasmonic metal nanoparticles （MNPs）, ＂photoswitchable＂ imaging of single gold nanorods （AuNRs） was accomplished not only in two dimensions but also in three dimensions. Moreover, the Rayleigh scattering background arising from the congested subcellular structures was efficiently suppressed. Thus, we obtained the 3D distributions of both the position and the orientation of the AuNRs inside the cells and investigated their intemalization kinetics. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the confocal-like 3D imaging of non-fluorescence nanoparticles with a high resolution and almost zero background. This technique is easy to implement and should greatly facilitate MNP studies and applications in biomedicine and biology.展开更多
基金Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Natural Sdence Foundation of China （Nos. 91027037, 21127009, 21425519 and 21221003）, Hunan University 985 fund, Tsinghua University Startup fund, the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province （No. LY16B050006） and Wenzhou Medical University Setup fund （No. QTJ15022）.
文摘There is an increasing demand for advanced optical imaging techniques that can detect and resolve nanosize objects at a spatial resolution below the optical diffraction limit, especially in three-dimensional （3D） cellular environments. In this study, using a polarization-activated localization scheme based on the orientation-dependent properties of anisotropic plasmonic metal nanoparticles （MNPs）, ＂photoswitchable＂ imaging of single gold nanorods （AuNRs） was accomplished not only in two dimensions but also in three dimensions. Moreover, the Rayleigh scattering background arising from the congested subcellular structures was efficiently suppressed. Thus, we obtained the 3D distributions of both the position and the orientation of the AuNRs inside the cells and investigated their intemalization kinetics. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the confocal-like 3D imaging of non-fluorescence nanoparticles with a high resolution and almost zero background. This technique is easy to implement and should greatly facilitate MNP studies and applications in biomedicine and biology.
